


Captures

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/M, Family, Hurt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-06-09 02:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6885238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t love you.” </p><p>The words come as soon as she hears the tap at the door. They fill the perfunctory pause before it swings open.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Eight-hundred words and letting go.  
>  

“I don’t love you.” 

The words come as soon as she hears the tap at the door. They fill the perfunctory pause before it swings open. They hang in the air, a prelude to the sound of one step, then two. That’s all it takes to cover the distance to the bed, now that she’s in a private room. 

She knows it’s him, even though she’s facing away and the curtain behind her is half drawn. Even though she's staring out the tiny window that should be close enough to touch. It would be—nearly, anyway—if the sill weren’t crowded with the vases and baskets and terra cotta pots that haven’t stopped coming yet. It would be, if she weren’t broken, but she is. Too broken, even to face him, though she might not have done that anyway. 

“Kate?” It's a question. Rising inflection, though the silence before and after her name tells her that he heard her well enough. He steps around the foot of the bed, even so. He edges into the narrow gap between her and the riot of flowers. It’s an odd tableau. Him against the backdrop of tiny white cards, every single one unopened. The lot of them hovering like clouds above a child’s forest of colors. He steps between her and the glimpse of brick wall and tar-paper roof just out the window. 

“I don’t.” She lifts her chin to look him in the eye at last. It’s the least she can do. Literally the least she can do. “I’m sorry.” 

He crushes something in his fist. A gift shop bag, maybe. He shoves it, fist and all, through the slash in his long white coat. All the way down into the pocket of his precisely creased slacks. It bumps at the plastic ID hanging from his belt. Strange confirmation that it's really him. 

She doesn't see him like this, with tie and coat and all the rest. She'd never once seen him like this until she first woke, groggy and in agony, to find this stranger at her bedside. She’d needed it then. That confusing square of plastic dangling from a belt loop. She’d needed it, even though it told what seemed like a lie at the time. 

She stares at it now. That same square of plastic, and as hard as this is—as awful as the whole of her life is in this moment—it still seems like a lie. She doesn't know this version of him, and that bears her up. She doesn't know this man, any more than he knows her. Saying so might not be right. Nothing is right, and it’s unkind. It’s certainly unkind. But saying it feels like the least wrong thing. 

 _It’s a good picture_ , she thinks inanely as she waits for him to say something. For it to be over. For whatever comes next.  

"You don't love me." He shifts on his feet like he's settling in. Like he’s staying to have this out. She wishes he wouldn’t. Feels pity for this stranger that she never felt for the version of him she ought to have known. “Do you think that’s news to me, Kate?” 

Her face flushes hot. Blood pounds through her, and she hurts everywhere. _Everywhere._ She doesn’t know what she was expecting. 

“I guess not.” She closes her eyes, but that’s far from better. She thinks about Haiti. How they fought, and he didn’t go. The freezer and the stoic look he gave her as he stepped out of the ambulance to tell her Castle was ok.  _He asked about you. First thing._ “It is . . . to me it is.” 

A sound scrapes out of him. It takes her a second to realize it’s laughter. 

“You know, I actually believe that.” 

He stands by her bed. His fingers twitch at his hip, and she hears the rustle of paper again. She hopes he doesn’t give it to her, whatever it is he brought with him. She hopes it stays right there in his pocket.  

It’s overwhelming already. This tiny room crammed tight with flowers and this man she owes her life to. This stranger. She turns her face into the pillow. She means to say she’s sorry again. She means to say something that marks an end. But he just keeps standing there. It’s overwhelming. 

“I wish I could.” She blinks at that. It’s awful and she knows it. 

He knows it, too. His face hardens. Everything about him does. 

“That, I don’t believe.” He steps away. She opens her eyes to the riot of flowers. To brick and tar paper through a sliver of window. She hears the hiss and clang of the garbage can lid. Something solid landing in it and the pneumatic sigh of the door. “Goodbye, Kate.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s won the argument. She’s worn him down, at least, and he’s going. He hates it with a quiet, heart-broken kind of fury, but he’s going. She’s too relieved to feel guilty. Almost too relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another 800 words.

 She’s won the argument. She’s worn him down, at least, and he’s going. He hates it with a quiet, heart-broken kind of fury, but he’s going. 

She’s too relieved to feel guilty. Almost too relieved.  

“Katie.” He turns back toward her. The bag hooked over his shoulder props open the battered screen door, and the night creeps in from outside, louder here and more insistent than any city street. He’s drawn out the process of going long enough for that, and she hates him a little for it. For trying, even now, to buy one more sunrise. One more chance to talk her out of this. “I wish you would . . .” 

“I’m fine, Dad.” She rises from the sway-backed couch to show it. It’s an ill-considered look-no-hands move, though, and she oversells the smile. She feels her teeth coming together hard and knows she’s overselling it, but she pushes through.  “Better every day, and your case . . .” 

“You’re not fine,” he cuts in. He won’t dignify the idea that this is somehow for him. He brushes entirely by the implication that this has anything at all to do with him or his work or his needs. 

He looks at her standing there, holding herself up, and he breaks the same way he has with every milestone. When her eyes stayed open for more than sixty seconds at a time. When she could sit up in bed long enough to push a meal around on a plate. When she left the hospital on her own two feet, in defiance of God, policy, and everything. 

He breaks the same way he did when she insisted on climbing the creaking stairs to the cabin on her own. When they both pretended he couldn’t hear her sobbing in her room. Sobbing with pain and exhaustion the whole long night after. The planes of his face fracture, and his eyes grow bright. 

“You’re better.” His voice is thick. It’s thick every time, like he can’t believe she’s here, alive and breathing. Like the fact of her standing there is a miracle. “You’re better every day, and thank God and what little sense you have for that. But you are  _not_  fine.” 

“I will be.” She closes the distance between them. That costs her, too. Even those few, weary steps, but her honesty will move him more than a brave face ever could. He’s like her. She’s like him, and she knows just the cracks to creep in through to get her way. “I have to be able to do this, Dad. I have to pull myself back together.” 

“And you have to do it alone? In the middle of nowhere?” 

He blazes up, words he hasn’t dared in weeks breaking free in the eleventh hour. She blazes up, too, like she’s sixteen again. Like she’s hard done by and ready to fight. 

It’s a brief bout of savagery on both sides, but he’s the one to give in. To hold up a hand and fend off an answer he already knows. 

“I wish there were more of your mother in you.” He reaches down for the duffle at his feet. Uses it to knock the screen door wide and more of the night comes howling in. “Less of me.” 

“Dad.” She’s sorry. She’s choking on it, but she can’t do this any more. She can't bear the scrutiny and the weight of love she doesn't deserve. Love she’s too broken to even hold, let alone return. “I’ll call.” 

She lets herself fall heavy against him. The bag drops at his feet. The door squeals closed, and she lets herself be heavy. She lets him hold her too gingerly and whisper nicknames he hasn’t used in years. She lets him see that she won’t change her mind. That she can’t. 

“You  _will_  call,” he says finally. “Every day. You will let me hear your voice and know that you’re still breathing, or I will be back here as fast as these backroads will bring me. And you won’t get rid of me twice.” 

“Every day,” she says, though that costs her, too. The promise costs her, and she’s learning already to dread the dead air and stilted conversation. She’s thinking already what she’ll have to give up to arrange herself so she sounds brave. Better every day. She hates him a little for that, too. They way he creeps in through cracks of his own. 

But he’s going.

The door bangs shut. His feet are leaden on the stairs, and he sits a long while behind the wheel before the engine turns over. Before the headlights blind her where she stands in the doorway, then swing in a wide arc across the blue-black trees.   

He’s going, and she’s too relieved to feel guilty. 

Almost too relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although I have more written, I don’t think this will get any longer. Just letting things go.  


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She welcomes the echo of the cabin’s empty spaces. It's nonsense to think she wouldn't relish it. Silence after all that. After so many days of her dad’s well meaning words and worried looks. She's hungry for solitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another 1000 words. I wasn't anticipating working with this any more.

She welcomes the echo of the cabin’s empty spaces. It's nonsense to think she wouldn't relish it. Silence after all that. After so many days of her dad’s well meaning words and worried looks. She's hungry for solitude. Ravenous, and all she feels now is relief. Gratitude that there's no one to see her breath hitching along her ribs and color draining from her face as she staggers from here to there.

She lies in front of the fire, face down like she’s not supposed to. She lets the tears come then, scalding her, inside and out. There’s no one to hide them from, and it’s something like rest. It should be, but she aches. 

It’s not that she’s lonely. Lonelier. It's not that.

She counts the the floorboards. The gaps in between them, and she knows she's been lonely all the while. In the chaos of the hospital with hands prodding at all hours. Hands lifting and moving her body. Sheets whisked back without warning, exposing her. Voices coming from high above to discuss her in bullet points, as though she—the whole of her—was irrelevant. Glances exchanged right over her head as jargon streams over her skin, pulling her apart into disparate concerns. Lungs. Heart. Muscle and range of motion. Skin and scars. What’s healing and what’s beyond repair. 

She was lonely in the midst of all that. Lonely long before, and once upon a time, he was the only one brave enough to say it out loud. To do anything about it. To try, at least, and she sent him away. The first banishment.  

_You could be happy. Kate. You deserve to be happy, but you're afraid._

_You know what we are, Castle? We are over._

She’s no lonelier now that hers is the only voice that sounds, and rarely at that. So rarely, but it's not what makes her ache.  Whatever else is or isn’t healing, _this_ particular wound is deep and jagged. Self-inflicted and pre-existing. Precisely the same as it’s been all these weeks, months, years. It’s as familiar and raw as it ever was. 

 

* * *

 

She should have asked her dad to take the damned thing with him. The phone. She should have asked him to smash it or bury it or sink it in the lake. It’s a mad, nonsensical thought, pinging back and forth between pain and the black, staring revelations of solitude.

But she didn’t ask him, and there it lies, dark before her and not quite out of reach. Her fingertips crawl toward it. She touches the name. _Castle._ She summons his image—a rare, serious shot of him in profile that he hates. That he’s changed over and over. Replaced it with something ridiculous of his own choosing, only to have her change it back every time to this. An honest glimpse of him, harsh light, unflattering angle and all. It’s one of the more harmless games they've played. 

What she’s playing at tonight isn’t so harmless, and it’s far from new. She’s done this a dozen times a day since she hobbled through the cabin’s slanting doorway, leaning hard enough on her dad’s shoulder to make them both stumble. A dozen times a day since the phone made its way back to her, bagged and tagged along with the sad few things that aren’t sitting in evidence somewhere. 

The game isn’t new at all, but this is a different world. She's alone. Finally alone, and the practiced drag of fingers—the reverent pause and press of her thumb just at the tip of his chin—takes on the weight of decision. It becomes a choice, no longer a thing simply transpiring, a thing happening to this passive, broken creature that isn't her. Can't be her, except it is.  

_They say that there are some things that are better not being remembered._

_I’ll call you, okay?_

The _way_ it matters is new, now she’s alone. The way it matters is different. Is more terrible, because calling is a possibility. It’s not something bricked up behind a thousand impediments. Behind medication and Josh and her dad and hospital linens and not a millisecond of privacy to call her own. 

She’s alone now. She sits up for hours on end. Feeds and cleans herself, after a fashion. Walks and keeps up with the miserable exercises that leave her gasping. 

She could call him. She wants to. She should. 

She doesn't.

She skates her fingers over the screen, _call_ and _end call_ , not quite simultaneously. She trails through her log. She has every night all these weeks, anyway, but his name doesn’t flicker by until the very end now. Twenty-three missed calls, and they're all but gone. A day or two of this promise to her dad will do in the rest.

_You_ will _call. Every day._

Her breath catches in her throat when she thinks of that. A string of hard knots descending into her belly. She swipes blindly away from the list. She presses her cheek to the rough braid of the ancient fireplace rug. She reaches for anger. For the only thing in her that isn’t pain.  

She sees his name filling the screen and feels the weight of his body pinning her to the car. She feels the bite of his palm covering her mouth and the paradox of gentle fingers sweeping her hair back from her face. She feels every other possible ending ticking away. Gunshots and muzzle flash while he chants _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_ into the cold sliver of night between his lips and her skin. 

It's a thing of a moment. _Anger._ It's not even that, though she thrusts the phone away from her. She sends it clattering across the uneven floor, and anyone watching would say it must be anger. She must be so angry with him. But that’s not it at all. 

She's heavy against the floor. She watches the fire—unmoving, unseeing, unfeeling—until it dies.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I revisited this as I was mulling over a prompt from someone on tumblr. I don't know if this might eventually connect to that. Maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, this was going to be part of the Sequel to A Brief Madness. But the best-laid plans . . .


End file.
